What I Learned From Touring a House Construction Site

Touring a new home construction site with one of the principals of the interior design/architecture firm was an important lesson in adapting to a client's needs.

While the firm principals had specific design ideas, they had to modify these ideas to meet the cultural design requirements of the client.

And this ability to be flexible is important for all of us who work with clients, whether in marketing or any other profession.

Yes, we may have very strong convictions about the "best" way for a website home page to look or the "best" floor covering for a particular situation. But we are not going to be the people living with the website or the floor covering.

We don't need to abandon our ideas. But we do need to be able to meld our ideas with the desires of the client to find solutions that please the client and ourselves.

Here's an example from my own experience:

Yael and I recommend our website clients only use URLs that are .com – otherwise a client may be helping his/her competition when someone types in the URL with .com instead of the client's .biz or another extension.

Yet recently a website client wanted the .net for his website URL. It was important to him, so we built the site on that URL. Now it's up to him to help people find his site.

Of course, sometimes being flexible can lead to an even better solution than either your idea or the client's idea. This is a terrific example of two heads being better than one.

The other important thing we all have to remember is that we can't know everything about our field. There are always new things to learn – and that's what can make life exciting.

And having said that, I need to spend more time exploring the features on Google+ – the next big frontier in social media connections.

© 2011 Miller Mosaic LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter) has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is the co-founder of the marketing consulting company Miller Mosaic, LLC, which offers "done for you" and "do it yourself" social media services including marketing-focused WordPress websites.

Visit Phyllis' "about" page on Google Plus.

Information about Phyllis' fiction books and ebooks is available on her Amazon author page at http://budurl.com/PZMAmazon